The Boyling Effect

Treading into the land of multiplayer

Finished the single-player campaign of Gears of War 2 this weekend (on Normal). It was decent, not much more, and the finale was somewhat disappointing to say the least. But having beaten the game, I decided to take a little trip into Gears of War 2’s multiplayer. I played a fair bit of the first game’s multiplayer, and having read about the new game modes I was a bit curious to see how well it actually worked.

A couple of hours later, I turned off the console with mixed feelings. I first tried the Horde mode, which was a bit confusing at first, but still pretty straightforward: survive 50 rounds of increasingly difficult mobs of monsters. Fair enough. What it resulted in, however, was a trash-talk fest with a bunch of 14 year olds using their headsets rather vigorously and a game mode that felt more like a time sink than an engaging challenge. Still, it’s fun to shoot at stuff, to some degree.

I then attempted to try the more deathmatch-oriented multiplayer modes but I was unfortunately stuck in the matchmaking lobby for 10 minutes without the hope of ever finding suitable matches. This leads me to think of two possible reasons: either there’s very little people playing Gears of War 2 online (on a Saturday night even!) or the matchmaking system is completely messed up! Either way it was a disappointment, and I ended up playing a round of Uno instead. That’s right, Epic. Uno.

It took me about 10 seconds to find a four player game and they all hung around for the whole game, never even using their headsets. Something tells me that there aren’t a lot of 14 year old kids playing Uno, which I think can only be considered a good thing. So, Uno – Gears of War 2: 1 – 0.